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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a