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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-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 nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly explored 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a