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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember 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 pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech 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 failing 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 archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a