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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive 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 gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a