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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later 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. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library 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 emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a