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All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-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 emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character 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 depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – 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 carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound 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 increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a