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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise 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 commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam 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 believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a