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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace 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 was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written 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 broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a