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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played 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, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a