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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a