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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into 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 the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a