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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably 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 commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a