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Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated 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 realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “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 emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a