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All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to 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 short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a