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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping 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 ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a