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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated 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 been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. 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 pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, marriage, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a