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Every one of the great dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “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 touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a