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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and often moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently 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 ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed 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 pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside 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 addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms 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 Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a