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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often discussed 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 important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a