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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. 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 beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a