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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a