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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably 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 acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a