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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a