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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a