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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced 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 space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social 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 entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a