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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow 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 multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. 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 beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed 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 dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile 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 visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed 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 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 says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a