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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a