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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in 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 emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often 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 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 totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a