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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex 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 pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora 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 perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a