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All the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken 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 Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached 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 increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a