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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a