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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library 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 time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a