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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace 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 currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence 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 accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a