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All the great dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a