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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a