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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a