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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young 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 today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a