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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver 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 cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary 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 word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a