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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met 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 today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a