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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly 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 give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually 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 crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex 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 gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts 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 bad person 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 important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a