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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject 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 broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a