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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit 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 stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence 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 joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a