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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose 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 perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a