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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a