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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of 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 give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a