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All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding 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 apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses 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 beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a