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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a