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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial 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 declared crazy and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a