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All the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up 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 time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. 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 stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a