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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement 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 heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently 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 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 think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a