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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a