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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke 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 speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a