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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached 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 apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a