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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing 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 resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and locked in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a