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All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts 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 depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive 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 touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a