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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a