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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a