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All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 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 casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked 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.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a