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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – 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 carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses 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 independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a