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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in 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 cleverness 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 critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a