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All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a