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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties 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 word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind 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 addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a