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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran 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 time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a