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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and confined in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a