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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. 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 start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former 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 audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a