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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “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 moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a