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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile 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 most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a