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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally 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 crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in conversations. “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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a