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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much 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 today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a