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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much 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 today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a