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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average 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 realised that it was also about the pain 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 Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a