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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always 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 commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a