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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across 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 unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished 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 time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

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

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a