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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a