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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. 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 struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later 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 brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a