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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a