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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging 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 today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a