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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity 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 sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably 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 praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers 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 Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views 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 addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a