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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-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 captivated by the creativity 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 dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, 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 understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a