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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called 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 reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared 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 collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a