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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly 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 brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a