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All the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually 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 ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a