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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a