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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken 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 Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a