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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re 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 had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor 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 quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came 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 visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a