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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace 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 currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a