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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called 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 driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London 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 emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often discussed 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a