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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always 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 praised for its brilliance 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 arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a