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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a