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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of 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 torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a