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All the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

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 always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written 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 pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a