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All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a