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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a