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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace 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 remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a