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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture 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 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a