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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a