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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor 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 pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture 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 pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation 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 relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a