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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating 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 speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a