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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a