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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a