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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always 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 praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping 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 feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a