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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a