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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside 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 pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a