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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named 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 broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up 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 struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a