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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling 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 remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a