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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise 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. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a