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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 struck by the cleverness 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 opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. 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 language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister 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 theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a