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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a