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All the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing 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 resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture 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 failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a