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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember 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 stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – 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, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a