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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give 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 impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace 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 was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally 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 constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying 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 predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a