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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator 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 got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness 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 arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a