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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a