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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a