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All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed 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 consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a