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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity 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 critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to 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 moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a