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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a