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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance 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 dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation 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 complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a