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Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised 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 previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up 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 apparent. The turning point arguably came with 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 result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely 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 Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a