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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word 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 heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a