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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating 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 causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a