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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – 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 meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a