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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a