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All the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of 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 torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a