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Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, 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 fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a