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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab 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 speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War 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 totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a