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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely 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 audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared 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 failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a