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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue 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 characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared 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 risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a