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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly 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 intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a