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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment 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 witty, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling 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 Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a