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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a