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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated 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 speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven 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 finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous 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 sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching 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 increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number 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, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a