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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a