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All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance 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 sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a