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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London 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 feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a