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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a