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All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a