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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described 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 contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers 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 had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a