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All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity 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 the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed 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 failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial 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 mad and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a