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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit 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 remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably 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 acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding 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 choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a