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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently 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 cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a