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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to 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 mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed 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 causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries 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 perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a