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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a