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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written 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 pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation 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 totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a