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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a