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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. 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 present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding 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 sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a