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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. 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 brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a