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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just 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 answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and locked in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a