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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed 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 quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up 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 more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly 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 Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a