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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability 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 intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a