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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. 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 Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt 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 in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a