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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in 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 grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture 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 pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a