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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and often touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, 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 cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor 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 beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, 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 scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying 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 volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a