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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from 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 at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a