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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance 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 chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed 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 disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a