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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet 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 dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a