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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 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 random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed 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 quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, 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 grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a