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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a