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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere 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 Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a