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All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably 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 cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal 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 iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a