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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a