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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social 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 believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a