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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared 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 fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a