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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a