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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a