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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called 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 driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a