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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping 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 more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a