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All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time 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 creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech 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 pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a