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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly 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. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness 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 arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a