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All the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a