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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a