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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack 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 ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a