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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a