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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

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 thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a