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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a