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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually 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 minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], 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 running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a