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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering 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 archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a