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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. 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 Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a