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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and often touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and locked in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a