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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a