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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a