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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. 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 language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a