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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally 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 crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a