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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember 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 quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a