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Every one of the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a