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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening 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 one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation 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 Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a