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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian 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 incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a