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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a