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All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy 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 shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a