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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-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 one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a