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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful 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 was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a