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Every one of the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re 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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace 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 now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive 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 sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex 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 clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness 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 accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a