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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech 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 pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a