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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture 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 brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a