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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk 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 unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – 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 studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a