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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping 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 visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a