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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a