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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a