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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack 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 increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a