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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a