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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised 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 victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. 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 dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a