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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared 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 pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came 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 ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a