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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a