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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a