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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a