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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a