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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a