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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up 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 apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: 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 shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction 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 provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a