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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a