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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average 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 astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a