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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with 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, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

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

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a