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Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

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

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts 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 bad person 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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a