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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile 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 evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a