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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time 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 constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a