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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a