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All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator 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 youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and confined in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a