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All the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a