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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow 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 seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written 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 perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple 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 Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a