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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up 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 cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw 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 astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a