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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared 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 broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind 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 explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or 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 entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a