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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, 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 praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential 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 emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding 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 feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly 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 Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a