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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared 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 broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a