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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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 thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a