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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a