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All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always 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 brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “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 moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a