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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: 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 consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up 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 ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra 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 strictness with a