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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising 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 voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. 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 language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a