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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a