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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying 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 explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a