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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance 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 critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated 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 holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a