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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in 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 cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a