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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted 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 stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 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 completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a