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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks 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 Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social 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 believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a