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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken 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.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a