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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising 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 time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a