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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

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 character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 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 addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a