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All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: 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 topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a