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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness 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 the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a