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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember 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 pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a