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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared 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 steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a