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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember 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 silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a