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All the great dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The 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 the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a