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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, 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 praised for its cleverness in crafting 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 extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London 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 time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 avert indirectly 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 the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a