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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating 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 resulting in our end. I remember 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 beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social 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 feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a