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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a