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Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later 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 intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a