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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a