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All the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest 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, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given 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 watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a