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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction 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 entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a