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All the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a