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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently 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 commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties 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 word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a