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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a