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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a