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All the great dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a