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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, 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 realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often explored in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a