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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an real madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a