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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture 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 suffering 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.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a