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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit 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 remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a