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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy 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, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a