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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a