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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact 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 emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, 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 always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a