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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 captivated 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 been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken 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.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile 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 visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a