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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched 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 astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties 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 pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a