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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the 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 The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always 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 acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a