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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described 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 driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging 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 The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling 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 emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached 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 increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a