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All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding 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 emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a