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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor 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, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a