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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a