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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a