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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides 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 at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive 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 sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a