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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack 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 more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a