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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a