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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a