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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly 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 cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, 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 understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a