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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a