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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played 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 quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a