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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any 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 justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a