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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing 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 voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised 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 Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library 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 passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a