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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually 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 ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a