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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing 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 had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War 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 says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a