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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness 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 sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a