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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

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

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed 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 failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile 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 increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a