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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a