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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute 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 speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor 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 beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a