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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting 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 causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic 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 feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a