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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a