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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a