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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in 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 had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember 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 resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed 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 fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a