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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a