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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated 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 speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties 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, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a