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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso 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 narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a