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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach 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 is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a