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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a