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All the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity 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 was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture 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 failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a