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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a