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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a