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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably 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 acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a