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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked 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 voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a