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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. 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. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a