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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a