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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace 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 currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually 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 brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a