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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as 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 driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching 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 increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a