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Every one of the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: 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 always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, 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 space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a