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All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

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

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling 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 emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a