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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity 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 dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction 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 entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a