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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a