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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a