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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace 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 now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: 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 always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed 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 fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a