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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

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 BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a