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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often explored in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a