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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly 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 passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a