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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 hesitation 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 totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a