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All the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written 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 broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly 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 the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a