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All the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in 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 eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction 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 totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a