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All the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language 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 combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a