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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a