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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a