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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a