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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much 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 today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a