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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister 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 receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a