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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound 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 ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often talked about 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a