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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing 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 speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a