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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet 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 dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended 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 casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 refer obliquely 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 offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a