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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a