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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech 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 fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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 thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and confined in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a