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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – 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, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a