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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a