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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive 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 touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a