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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 obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance 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 causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound 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 increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a