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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet 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 premiere 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 Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a