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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time 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 minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a