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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor 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 resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, 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 risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly explored 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a