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All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, 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 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 ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a