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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due 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 deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up 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 private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a