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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity 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 critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. 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 word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a