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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance 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 sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages 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 individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a