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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude 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 understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a