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All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly 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. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a