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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in 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 young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a