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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time 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 crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a