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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a