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All the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran 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 speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling 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 now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a