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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word 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 blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a