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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy 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 suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a