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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. 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 language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice 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 bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. 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 falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a