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All the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in 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, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. 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 rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a