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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive 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 incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a