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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed 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 fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a