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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed 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 pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound 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 ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a