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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present 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 constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – 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 researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a