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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a