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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers 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 Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a