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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently 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 ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a