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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet 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 dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often discussed 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 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 important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a