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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and often touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a