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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, 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 commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a