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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later 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 intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a