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All the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a