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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-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 voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a