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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a