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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas 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 realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a