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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a