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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor 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 pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 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 avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and locked in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a