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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly 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 intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a