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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a