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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical 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 experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a