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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath 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 explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a