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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a