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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound 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 evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a