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All the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named 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 short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a