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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing 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 time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a