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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked 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-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing 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 success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath 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 explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a