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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab 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 youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The 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 understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous 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 thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a