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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a