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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped 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 ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a