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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a