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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always 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 commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister 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 viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a