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All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-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 got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched 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 scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a