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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. 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 resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile 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 more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 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 meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a