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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 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 arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a