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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood 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 previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a