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All the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a