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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-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 knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a