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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known 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 time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a