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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], 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 presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a