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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked 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 time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a