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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a