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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a