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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. 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 Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time 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 ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, 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 perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly 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 offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a