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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose 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 perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation 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 Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a