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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding 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 sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a