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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise 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. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound 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 increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a