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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. 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 praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up 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 increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a