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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

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

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – 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 carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a