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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally 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 brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a