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All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library 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 apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a