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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and often moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. 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 got to meet 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 critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. 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 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 sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a