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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently 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 praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], 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 presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a