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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated 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 finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a