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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing 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 is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up 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 likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a