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All the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, 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 dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a