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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given 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 saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister 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 theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a