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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a