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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt 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 understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a