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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive 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 touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a