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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known 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 operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a