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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks 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 deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a