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All the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise 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. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile 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 ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties 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 pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a