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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as 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 driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a