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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library 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 passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a