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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently 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 acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a