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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a