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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor 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 the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind 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 host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a