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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling 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 now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. 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 cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding 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 sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a