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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a