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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described 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 operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace 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 currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a