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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to 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 dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a