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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. 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 entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor 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 beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a