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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing 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 leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a