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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling 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 seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely 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 brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a