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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a