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All the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack 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 more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance 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 revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a