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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary 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 beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a