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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always 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 acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a