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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a