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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity 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 dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. 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 cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in 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 resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. 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 falsely declared insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a