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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a