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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a