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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a