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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 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 casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a