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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed 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 resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “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 tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a