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Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

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

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a