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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous 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 theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a