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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise 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 acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a