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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library 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 years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a