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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace 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 was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a