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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute 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 cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise 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 praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped 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 Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a