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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace 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 now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- 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 audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a