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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk 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 broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a