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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a