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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion 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 big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a