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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember 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 pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a