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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … 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 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up 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 ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a