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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to 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 apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a