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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a