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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling 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 touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a