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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often explored in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a