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Every one of the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a