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All the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a