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All the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, 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 astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views 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 deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a