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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a