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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally 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 reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a