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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got 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 critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in 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 beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated 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 holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a