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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re 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 cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again 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, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech 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 dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching 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 sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a