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All the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation 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 carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a