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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise 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. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms 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 completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a