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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. 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 creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a