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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time 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 ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a