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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed 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 ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a