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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing 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 Affecting Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often explored 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a