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All the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a