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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

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

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always 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 praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed 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 subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a