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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating 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 Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a