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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough 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 complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often explored in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a