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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a