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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally 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 crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness 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 intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a