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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey 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 word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a