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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood 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 Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a