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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a