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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing 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 language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a