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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly 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 little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a