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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a