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All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally 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 Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually 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 ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, 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, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social 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 believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a