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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech 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 risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a