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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor 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, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a