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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a