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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a