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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal 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 definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain 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 emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a