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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. 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 word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual 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 broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a