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All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time 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 ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a