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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re 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 cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound 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 ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a