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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The 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 grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably 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 commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile 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 evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a