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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

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

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a