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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a