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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a