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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity 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 now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later 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 intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – 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 carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often 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], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a