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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. 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 creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually 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 crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached 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 ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely 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 Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a