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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising 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 time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], 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 offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a