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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a