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All the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind 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 explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often explored in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a