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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a