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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness 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 arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a