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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling 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 neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation 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 investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a