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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I 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 destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 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 says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a