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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-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 struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a