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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a