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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a