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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity 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 today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in 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 beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, 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 realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached 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 key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a