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All the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. 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 cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a