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All the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity 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 opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. 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. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a