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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a