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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 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 casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. 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 dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a