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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research 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 carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a