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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling 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 exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a