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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy 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 one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, 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 risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a