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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared 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 pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a