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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young 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 currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word 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 distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a