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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a