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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic 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 big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a