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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember 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, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment 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 profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a