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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization 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 host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a