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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging 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 today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 social 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 believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a